How have natural corks stayed on top of the wine world? Antonio Amorim’s efforts to make the cork business more innovative and sustainable have a lot to do with it.
For centuries, cork has been the primary method of closing wine bottles. Then in the late 20th century came cheaper stoppers and—though not without some controversy—the value end of the market was suddenly awash in bottles topped with colorful plastic “corks” or metal screwcaps. That would have been alarming enough for a family cork business founded in 1870.

But at the same time, high-end wineries were facing a problem with TCA taint, which could make wines smell and taste like musty cardboard or—in a way even worse for the producers—muted and boring, without being obviously flawed. The problem was largely blamed on flawed natural corks, whose plant phenols interact with chlorine and mold to form 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, and was even simply referred to as “cork taint.” That gave the alternative closures even more traction among winemakers and wine drinkers, though it turned out that TCA can develop in barrels, wooden pallets and winery equipment and cellars could be contaminated with similar compounds that produce musty aromas.

As chairman and CEO of Portugal-based Amorim Cork since 2001, Antonio Amorim has weathered all the upheaval and helped modernize a tradition-driven business. The family company began with Antonio’s great-grandfather producing cork stoppers for the local Port wine industry. Today, at more than 150 years old, Amorim Cork is the largest supplier of cork stoppers worldwide, with a presence in 20 countries. In addition to stoppers, its cork materials are used in the aerospace, automobile, construction and interior design sectors.

Born in 1967, Antonio earned a degree in international commerce from University of Birmingham in England and started with his family’s holding company as an intern before working his way through executive positions in different divisions. In 1996, he became chief executive for Amorim’s cork stopper division.

Among his core missions has been getting winemakers and consumers to not only trust cork again, by dramatically reducing the incidence of TCA taint to near zero, but to view it as the optimal closure for the world’s top-quality wines. He has done that by investing heavily in Amorim’s research and development arm and in new technology.

In addition, he has been working to get the message out that cork is also a sustainable product—not just to preserve the family business, but to ensure that Portugal’s cork oak forests are viable far into the future. These forests are not only important to the local economy, providing opportunities for economic and social development, but also to the entire world. They help capture large amount of carbon, play a key role in the Earth’s hydrological cycle, prevent soil erosion and are home to a diverse range of other plants and animals, among other benefits.

Amorim recently chatted with senior editor Aaron Romano about entering the family business, the importance of innovation and why sustainability has become a focus of his work.

Wine Spectator: Did you always expect that cork would be your calling, or did you have other career plans?

I started working in our company’s group in 1989, but I worked outside the cork industry. We had a very charismatic leader, my uncle, who basically said, “You’re not needed in the cork business at this time; you’re needed somewhere else. I think you need to get some experience elsewhere.”

I worked in other activities, such as real estate and hotel management. I also got involved in the management of the casino that the family owned and was part of the company’s board of directors that introduced a mobile phone, together with an American company called PacTel. I think that they were testing me. That was the original intention, but it was not communicated as such. Then there was an opportunity because some people left in 1995, and that’s when I was called in to take over the [cork] stoppers business.
The whole cork industry worldwide releases about 250,000 tons of CO2, but it captures 5.2 million [tons]. And this is, I believe, an absolutely unique feature: Our forests can also fight the advance of desertification.

Second, we just peel the tree bark once every nine years without interrupting the carbon capture. The tree regrows its “skin” every nine years, so we are talking about a natural material from a tree that will be cut down only at the end of its lifetime, typically beyond 170 to 200 years. Because cork does not require a lot of water to grow or to be maintained, the subsoil of the cork forest can create future water reserves. READ further from the source